Rick Tobias is best known for his lifelong advocacy on behalf of low-income and marginalized people. In 1983, he became co-ordinator of Yonge Street Mission’s Evergreen Centre, which he refocused to address needs of street youth in Toronto. His innovative work at Evergreen led to the invitation to become Yonge Street Mission’s CEO, a position he has held since 1989.

Sought after as a consultant and coach, Rick has spoken hundreds of times on Canadian poverty, urban ministry, youth at risk and strategies for community-wide change. Salvationist.ca recently interviewed Rick on how Christians can share their faith effectively in a world that is increasingly hostile or indifferent to the gospel.

Why are people no longer attracted to the Church?
The evangelical church has blown its credibility as a moral and spiritual leader in society. People don’t see us as spiritual; they see us as legalistic. They don’t see us as righteous; they see us as hypocritical.

Of course, we don’t help matters by going from scandal to scandal. People expect better from God’s representatives. When the soccer or hockey coach molests a child, people are upset but they are not quite so surprised. Yet when the pastor or church leader molests a child, it’s like God himself is doing it. It provokes a crisis of faith.

What really annoys people is that Christians too often call them to a moral standard that they don’t see us living by. What is worse, we don’t even have enough humility to admit we can’t always live by our own standard. They see us as self-righteous and say, “Get the log out of your own eye.”

At Yonge Street Mission, an increasing number of older Christians are volunteering with us because they, too, have lost faith in the Church. They find a more meaningful relationship with Christ in service than they do in their traditional congregations. How can we expect to retain our youth and draw new people when our adults are deeply unsatisfied? There is something we are not delivering.

What are we missing? What are people searching for?
I believe that when people walk into a church they are looking for two things: they want to connect with God and they want to connect with people. The problem is when you look for connectedness you also look for safety. Because the church is no longer known as a safe place, it makes the entry threshold even higher. I want to be connected to God, but the church is not a safe enough place for me to go to get connected.

In order to do mass evangelism or door-to-door evangelism—the traditional methods—you have to be recognized as safe or at least neutral. If you go and knock on someone’s door and they say, “Oh, that’s Pastor Rick from down the road. We don’t go to his church but we know he’s OK,” or if The Salvation Army shows up at your door and, although you don’t know the person standing there, you trust the Red Shield—in each case there is a perception of safety. 

Unfortunately, the Church as a symbol of the Christian community doesn’t carry the same credibility. That’s not to undermine the Church. It should be seen as a safe Christian symbol, but we have tarnished it. If there is a general diminishment of respect for the Church and its leaders, that means evangelism has to go in another direction. Too often our style of evangelism offends the people that God has given us to care for. It confirms their caricature image of us and pushes them away instead of drawing them to Christ.

What makes the old style of evangelism so unappealing?
The problem with the old methods is that they are immediate and decision-oriented. They are mechanical and sometimes violent. At Yonge Street Mission, we use the terms “non-violent” or “peaceable” evangelism. James 3:18 says, “The seed whose fruit is righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace” (NASB). Any time you pressure someone to make decisions they are not ready to make, that’s an act of violence. At the mission, we work with people who have been violated all their lives, people who from childhood have been physically, sexually and emotionally abused. So you can’t do anything evangelistically that has too much pressure—particularly in a community of survivors.

When I first started at Evergreen, we had the same evangelism paraphernalia as everyone else: The Four Spiritual Laws, Steps to Peace With God, and various other Bible tracts and spiritual surveys. We had all these tools but they were too mechanical: “If you go through this process you will be a Christian.”

There’s nothing wrong with the traditional modes of evangelism in the right places. There was a time when they worked, and the people who founded them did so with incredibly honorable motives. But eventually the tools themselves became evangelism, instead of something that assisted you in evangelism. When you take great Christian truths and turn them into a formula, they lose their spiritual power. Evangelism then becomes nothing more than: How many people signed on the dotted line? Have they linked up with a local church? Perhaps we should be more concerned with things like: Can we see any sign of God’s Spirit at work in them? Is there any evidence of conversion?

During my first months at Evergreen, decision cards would land on my desk every week. On Monday mornings I could measure the stacks of decision cards by the inch. I could go out to churches and say, “Last week at Evergreen 35 people made decisions for Jesus.” But when we started to follow up, people would evaporate into the mist. Some supporters would pat us on the back and say, “What a good evangelical agency,” but what we were doing was fraudulent.

It only took six months to realize that we needed to do evangelism another way. We developed more relational models and cautioned staff not to be manipulative. We told them, “Don’t you be the one who introduces Christ into the conversation. If you live by what you believe, other people will eventually raise the topic of faith.”

Did it work? Did people respond to this less aggressive approach?
Yes, but we discovered a deeper problem. I thought if we told our workers to hold off on the “faith talk,” we could be reasonably sure we weren’t being manipulative in our evangelism. But even those measures weren’t enough. What we discovered was that the young people in our setting didn’t know how to say no—they didn’t know how to keep themselves safe. 

One of the pathologies of abuse survivors is that they often begin to proactively anticipate the wishes of the abuser in order to curry favour or deflect the abuse. We discovered this also had ramifications in terms of evangelism. Kids would come to us and say they wanted to “receive Jesus as Lord and Saviour” or be “born again” before any of our counsellors had even raised the subject. We wondered where they even learned that kind of language.

What they were doing was anticipating our rejection. If we had gone to them and said, “Do you want to be a Christian?” and they said no, they were afraid we would tune them out. So instead, they decided to come to us first and say, “I want to be a Christian,” in hopes of putting themselves in our favour and securing our love.

We discovered that sometimes safe evangelism is actually pushing people away and saying, “You don’t have to make this decision right now. It’s not magic. God’s not some great social worker in the sky. Even if you make the decision to trust Jesus you’re still going to be homeless, you’re still going to be an addict. So hold on.” The other advantage of holding off was to help youth understand that we weren’t going to treat them any differently if they made a spiritual commitment.

What we do when we treat new believers differently is invite people to prostitute themselves. We say, “If you do this, this and this … (i.e. if you betray who you are), then you will receive special benefits.” But the true blessing of being Christian is ultimately a relationship with Jesus Christ. If I become a Christian, there’s no guarantee that I’ll be housed and clothed and fed and all my needs will miraculously be taken care of. We know that! That’s selling a second-rate gospel. The gospel is not about the blessings. It’s about the relationship—and relationship is the blessing. You don’t come to Christ for the benefits, you come because you are ready to walk with Jesus.

So what do you say to people?
Jesus never asked people to make the sort of decision that we call people to make. He never went up to people and said, “Would you like to receive me as your Lord and Saviour?” But on several occasions he said, “Come, follow me.” At Yonge Street Mission, we believe in tag-along evangelism. Like Jesus, we invite people to just come and hang out with us. We let them know they are welcome and try to make them feel at home. What we’ve discovered is that if people tag along, they will eventually notice that Christians are different from the world. If they hang out long enough with people who love Jesus, they will make their own decisions about him in their own time, in much healthier ways.